1966: The Year the Decade Exploded

By Jon Savage

Even in England, Jon Savage's 1966: The Year the Decade
Exploded hasn't been reviewed as broadly or warmly as his
definitive 1991 Sex Pistols biography England's Dreaming or his
century-straddling 2007 social-intellectual history
Teenage. And in the U.S., it's been totally, and unjustly,
ignored. I figure the problem is twofold. First, while at bottom a
work of history, 1966 isn't merely music-centered--unlike the
highly subcultural England's Dreaming, it's
pop-centered. Second, while Savage is right to see the year when "the
'60s" became what we mean by that metonym as epitomized by its pop
music, in the U.S. and the U.K. both history and music were racing
toward the future in parallel, not identically. They "exploded"
simultaneously, but somewhat differently.

Pop--not "serious" enough. U.S.-U.K.--dueling
perspectives. Nevertheless, as someone who began writing about 1966
and its panoply of aftermaths as I turned 24 in the East Village that
year, I learned a lot I didn't know from Savage, who began the year as
a London 12-year-old glued to pirate radio. Although he's less
comfortable describing the American phenomena he had to come here and
research than the British ones he's long since incorporated into his
discursive apparatus, he's careful to give the two nations equal
time.

In fact, one of 1966's chief virtues is how dutifully and
agilely this British freelance intellectual finesses these double
complexities. Of course he focuses on singles rather than
album--beyond Beatles-Stones-Dylan, 45s were still where the
conceptual action was. But on both sides of the Atlantic he finds
sociohistorical gold in not just major artists but utter
obscurities--in what has to be called "art" because it was too weird
for "pop." Nor does he make the fatal error of privileging the "pop
groups" soon to be designated "rock bands" over black artists. On the
contrary, James Brown and Motown in particular get many pages and
unmitigated respect. But typifying his schema's pitfalls is something
I'd never grasped--in Britain, the Motown classics covered by both the
early Beatles and the early Stones remained more cult items than hits
until Motown enlisted effective U.K. record-biz partners in 1965. I'm
grateful to Savage for clearing this up. But, if only because it's
literally impossible for him to squeeze everything in, he doesn't
explore it enough.

The complexities begin with an Anglocentric generalization in a
January chapter that builds to the sentence: "The pace of life
quickened in the mid-sixties, and the fear of nuclear annihilation was
the rocket fuel." This gave me pause--while "the Bomb" was without
question a potent metaphor in post-WW2 America, the ban-the-bomb
movement and hence bomb consciousness remained relatively marginal
here. But as Savage reminds us, in Britain the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament--fueled, I'd venture, by Britain's ingrained left
traditions and the still-fresh horrors of the Blitz--was mobilizing a
counterculture by 1958. Yet as Savage then explains, the CND had
"peaked in about '64-'65," leaving the U.S. to set the decade's
political tone via both its Vietnam War, which embroiled a draftee
army that numbered 185,000 at the beginning of 1966 and 385,000 just
12 months later, and its civil rights movement, which inspired a white
New Left datable to SDS's 1962 Port Huron Statement and in 1966
amalgamated the lessons of 1965's Selma march, the Civil Rights Act,
and the Watts rebellion into one controversial, irresistible slogan:
Black Power.

Backtracking to clarify and condensing for speed, Savage squeezes
these upheavals and many more into his 547 pages by keying a
month-titled chapter to each. May extols both a women's movement
sparked by Casey Hayden and Mary King's 1966 critique of SDS's
gender-based "caste system" and the Supremes and Dusty Springfield;
stretching a little, August links a barely nascent gay rights movement
to doomed U.K. producer Joe Meek. Usually, however, chapter themes are
less explicitly political: youth ideology, lysergic mind expansion,
Warhol's Factory, the onset of "soul," riots on Sunset Strip, and the
mad ferment, brave experiments, and silly pretensions of "rock."
There's a crucial and perhaps underplayed moment midway in, when Prime
Minister Harold Wilson imposes wage and price freezes on a British
economy that stalled years before America's did, sealing Swinging
London's decline into last year's brand. As the year slows to a close,
the Beatles are rumored to be recording an album that will change
everything. Next year's brand: the Summer of Love.

Without undertaking the impossible task of folding all this action
into a neat narrative, Savage constructs his mosaic efficiently. And
always he keeps one eye and both ears on the music. In this his wide
range is no less remarkable than his sense of thematic relevance. By
picking and choosing--although he's scrupulous about noting the wild
cards the pop charts always put on the table--he illustrates his
evolving theses with classics and finds, number ones shrouded in
memory and minor hits you missed and flops you never heard of. On the
Brit side are brief portraits of not just Beatles-Stones-Who but
Yardbirds-Kinks-Small Faces, on the Yank side deep readings of "Eight
Miles High" and "Good Vibrations" and "I'll Be Your Mirror" (as well
as Norma Tanega's "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog," a touchstone I'd long
believed lost to history). There's a pained yet comedic minor R&B hit
about the draft and a foreshortened James Brown B-side so frantic
Savage can't resist claiming that it "completely deconstructed black
music." There are smitten accounts of Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1000
Dances" and the Four Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There."

Scanning these passages again, I was struck by how nostalgic just
the raw titles made me--recalling the music sparked an affection and
awe that recalling the history did not. I knew this was just art
transmuting truth into beauty and pop putting a happy face on "96
Tears" and "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago." But to get a better bead
on it I played and replayed Jon Savage's 1966: The Year the Decade
Exploded, the double-CD he put together for Ace Records to accompany
his tome. Soon I found that it sounded even better than it had when I
reviewed it back in January. Turns out Savage was righter than I'd
thought about arcana from the Ugly's' prophetic, anti-hegemonic opener
"The Quiet Explosion" (all that in 2:40, really!) or the Human
Expression's freaked-out speed trip "Love at Psychedelic Velocity"
("We were basically trying to attract attention," Savage was
told). And with the music on my mind I began to wonder about something
that hadn't occurred to me as I read. No matter how "objectively"
accounted for, history is always individual for each person
experiencing it. What was tweenage Jon doing all this time? How many
of these tunes did he relish as a record nerd a-borning?

Having traversed unreasonable elation and tumultuous rage, giddy
hope and thwarted potential, Savage ends his big year fraught and
exhausted--on his final musical selection, a fragile Tim Hardin
wonders, "How can we hang on to a dream?" In Britain, maybe this was
how it was. But in America, I don't think so, because subtending what
Otis Redding had yet to dub "the love generation" was a material base
that, as Savage notes, was already shrinking in Wilson's U.K.--two
decades of rising prosperity with three years to go. And for me
personally I know this wasn't how it was, because 1966 was when I fell
in love and found my lifework, while Savage--and here I'm compelled to
guess--was a fresh-minted teenager trying to figure out who he was, a
struggle I'd guess once again came to some sort of resolution in punk
1977. How his own life evolved in tandem with his nation's during the
11 intervening years is something I'd love to learn more about.